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Elizabeth Warren: Democrats can still avoid disaster in November

Elizabeth Warren: Democrats can still avoid disaster in November

Elizabeth Warren writes: Democrats are the party of working people. Ahead of the 2020 election, we advanced ideas and plans that we believed would, in ways big and small, make our democracy and our economy work better for all Americans. Across this country, voters agreed with us — and gave us a majority in Washington so that we could deliver on those promises. Republican senators and broken institutions have blocked much of that promised progress. Now Republicans are betting that…

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How democracies spy on their own citizens

How democracies spy on their own citizens

Ronan Farrow writes: Commercial spyware has grown into an industry estimated to be worth twelve billion dollars. It is largely unregulated and increasingly controversial. In recent years, investigations by the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have revealed the presence of Pegasus on the phones of politicians, activists, and dissidents under repressive regimes. An analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research group at the University of London, has linked Pegasus to three hundred acts of physical violence. It has been used to…

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Taking decolonisation beyond Eurocentrism

Taking decolonisation beyond Eurocentrism

Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven writes: With the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Edward Said would become one of the most influential scholars of our era. The book transformed the study of the history of the modern world, as it offered insights into how racist discourses created and maintained European empires. As much for his political activities, Said and his work attracted a number of Right-wing critics, most notably perhaps Bernard Lewis. Less well known in the West is Samir Amin, the…

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The beauty of life

The beauty of life

Joshua Hicks and Frank Martela write: When we think about lives filled with meaning, we often focus on people whose grand contributions benefited humanity. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela surely felt they had a worthwhile life. But how about us ordinary people, toiling away in a typical existence? Many scholars agree that a subjectively meaningful existence often boils down to three factors: the feeling that one’s life is coherent and “makes sense,” the possession of clear…

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The Wagner Group: Putin’s doppelgänger army

The Wagner Group: Putin’s doppelgänger army

Joana de Deus Pereira writes: The German word doppelgänger literally translates as ‘walking double’ and alludes to paranormal ‘duplicates’ that can manifest in many ways: you can see them in your peripheral vision, meet them somewhere on a lonely road, or see them while looking in the mirror – you see them, but they do not exist. This description very much applies to the Wagner Group, the largely invisible, officially non-existent, unregistered, mighty and resourceful private army with obscure ties…

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Trump as a modern-day party boss

Trump as a modern-day party boss

The New York Times reports: On any given night, Donald J. Trump will stroll onto the patio at Mar-a-Lago and say a few words from a translucent lectern, welcoming whatever favored candidate is paying him for the privilege of fund-raising there. “This is a special place,” Mr. Trump said on one such evening in February at his private club. “I used to say ‘ground zero’ but after the World Trade Center we don’t use that term anymore. This is the…

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The danger more Republicans should be talking about

The danger more Republicans should be talking about

Ibram X. Kendi writes: The day after Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race last November, a Wall Street Journal headline declared: “Youngkin Makes the GOP the Parents’ Party.” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio exulted in this new party line on Twitter: “The Republican Party is the party of parents.” Polling data showed this new branding to be as misleading as the GOP’s framing of critical race theory. In a September Fox News poll, white respondents opposed the teaching of…

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How Zelenskiy’s team of TV writers helps his victory message hit home

How Zelenskiy’s team of TV writers helps his victory message hit home

The Guardian reports: On day 50 of Russia’s invasion, Volodymyr Zelenskiy made his nightly address to the Ukrainian people. Vladimir Putin had confidently expected to seize Ukraine in five days, Zelenskiy said, standing outside his neo-classical administration building in central Kyiv. Putin was now “making friends with reality”, he added mordantly, hailing the bravery and staunchness of his citizens. There was a reference to Russia’s flagship Moskva, which Ukraine says it audaciously sank last Wednesday with two lethal Neptune missiles….

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Fossil fuels v. our future — young Montanans wage historic climate fight

Fossil fuels v. our future — young Montanans wage historic climate fight

The Guardian reports: When Grace Gibson-Snyder was 13, she launched an independent project in her home town of Missoula, Montana, to encourage restaurants not to use single-use plastic containers. She found that youth activism enabled her to press the adults in her life to take the climate crisis seriously. Even if she was too young to vote, she could still be heard. Three years later Gibson-Snyder upped the ante by teaming up with 15 other young people on a novel…

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The real campus ‘free speech crisis’ is not what you think

The real campus ‘free speech crisis’ is not what you think

Lucas Mann writes: I’m a college professor, which is one of those jobs that people outside the profession love to ask you about. For the better part of a decade, most of those conversations have been about one thing: free speech. Are universities, once sites of pure, open intellectual discourse, no longer so pure? What is the future of this endeavor I’ve dedicated my life to, if my peers and I are afraid to speak our minds? In one way,…

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The impatience of Job

The impatience of Job

Abraham Riesman writes: No one has ever known quite what to make of Job. The title character of the Book of Job is a confounding figure for Christians, Muslims, Jews, and those of any faith who have tried to incorporate the story over millennia. The tale goes like this: Job is a perfectly righteous and God-fearing man whose good deeds have brought him prosperity—children, an estate, good health. But then God enters a wager with a member of the Heavenly…

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WHO calculates 15 million people have died from pandemic

WHO calculates 15 million people have died from pandemic

The New York Times reports: An ambitious effort by the World Health Organization to calculate the global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic has found that vastly more people died than previously believed — a total of about 15 million by the end of 2021, more than double the official total of six million reported by countries individually. But the release of the staggering estimate — the result of more than a year of research and analysis by experts around…

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The West finally starts rolling out heavy weapons for Ukraine

The West finally starts rolling out heavy weapons for Ukraine

Foreign Policy reports: The United States and its NATO allies have ramped up the delivery of tanks, helicopters, and heavy weapons to Ukraine as the country’s forces prepare for large-scale battles against Russian troops in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The new arms deliveries represent a stark shift from Western support for Ukraine in the earliest days of the war, when U.S. and European officials, unsure of how long Ukraine could hold out against a massive Russian invasion, were…

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How the narratives from the Kremlin and Fox News have converged in recent months

How the narratives from the Kremlin and Fox News have converged in recent months

The New York Times reports: As Western leaders introduced sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, said seizing personal property from Russian oligarchs went too far. “No American government had ever done anything like that before,” he said. While the segment was aimed at Fox News’s conservative audience, it found another audience in Russia. The argument was parroted beat by beat by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, which wrote that “the…

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